In this second airing of the John Dee Papers, all talk is of the End-time, and the dead seem to be rising. Following the sunless summer of 1560, black rumor surrounds the death of the woman who stood between Lord Robert Dudley and a possible marriage to the young Queen Elizabeth. Did Dudley's wife die from an accidental fall, or was it murder? Even John Dee, royal astrologer and one of Dudley's oldest friends, is uncertain. Then a rash promise to the Queen sends him to his family home on the Welsh border in pursuit of the Wigmore Shewstone, a crystal credited with tuning the mind to higher realms. Devious politics, small-town corruption, twisted religion, and a brooding superstition leave John Dee isolated in the land of his father—and then a vicious trap is sprung. The author of the Merrily Watkins mysteries (featuring the ordained Anglican exorcist of Hereford) as well as a recording artist and the host of the BBC Wales radio program Phil the Shelf, Phil Rickman created this intriguing Tudor mystery series, as recorded in the personal papers of Elizabeth's astrologer and adviser John Dee. "Dee was so extraordinary that the invention of fictional adventures for him might seem superfluous," noted BBC History, "but Phil Rickman's novels about the Elizabethan magus and alchemist are so entertaining and atmospheric that any such thoughts soon disappear."